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Monthly Archives: April 2016

Check out the article below. Much of the information in it is spot on and consistent with what I have seen with my clients who successfully find good jobs. Internships are wonderful for building relationships and credibility as well as trust and good will with a workplace. It is interesting that one of the later points the author makes is that some of her success was due to luck. The luck she had was that someone who needed her help read her materials online, was impressed, and offered her an opportunity. Yes, there is an element of luck, but what you should not underestimate is the value of good work and the recognition it can bring. Her luck was more predictable than she might be giving herself credit for. When you do good work in the work community you are engaged in, people take note and are likely to reach out to you. I see this happen all the time in the counseling work I do. This is the way to grow your career, through trust relationships that you nurture based on the good work that you do in your chosen field.

Let’s talk about some basic activities that are important to your success.

When it comes to business development, you always want to be engaged in these four activities:

Networking activities

Leadership activities

Meetings with key people

Cultivating current and past clients

A. What Constitutes Networking?

Networking is interactivity, “getting out and about,” meeting and greeting people. You want to spend your time and effort engaging and interacting with people in the neighborhoods that are promising when it comes to business development. Those neighborhoods usually include groups of lawyers who could refer cases to you, groups of lawyers who are in the same niche as you, and various groups of potential clients.

You want to go where they go mentally and physically. That means you want to be part of the neighborhood, a “player” if you will. You want to become someone who is active and interactive with many people in these target markets.

You might wonder why the lawyer group is so important. Many clients I have worked with have gotten most (even 80 or 90%) of their cases from other attorneys. Lawyers who do not practice in your practice area or your niche are possible referral sources. Competing lawyers who are conflicted out can be referral sources. Lawyers who go in-house can refer matters to you. Lawyers at your own firm in a different practice area might refer to you, and should refer to you.

This is the first of three blog posts on marketing strategies for lawyers.

Some Basic Ideas About Marketing

I’m going to start off by talking about some basic thoughts and ideas about marketing. These are things you might have heard about business development. We want to take a look at some of these ideas and see if they are true guiding principles or more like roadblocks.

A. No Infallible Rules

It has been said that in the marketing of legal services there is one rule: that there are no infallible rules, or at least no guarantees that following any particular rules will lead to making rain. This truth points up one of the underlying problems that lawyers encounter when they try to figure out a productive marketing strategy. How do they know that the time they invest in business development will actually pay off? The uncertainty about how to achieve success can lead to ambivalence about how to proceed, and whether the benefit is worth the cost in terms of effort and time.

Even though it is true that business development efforts do not come with a guarantee of success, it is also the case that failure to develop and work on marketing activities in a consistent way almost always guarantees that a lawyer will not develop sufficient business to have power and options in his or her career.